LIBRI DI CLAUDIO SOCCI

Il volume raccoglie alcuni saggi di politica economica dedicati a Gian Cesare Romagnoli e presentati nella Giornata in suo onore all’Università Roma Tre. Tra i temi affrontati: la contabilità economica italiana ed europea; la politica economica dell’ambiente; una trattazione metodologica e applicata del ciclo economico, del commercio internazionale, della sostenibilità fiscale del debito pubblico e dello stato del benessere per l’infanzia; la politica dei trasporti e la politica economica regionale.

Recently, political and scientific debate is strongly focused on issues questioning the economic sustainability of environmental policies at regional level. Following European directives and protocols and in accordance with the principles of sustainable development, the interventions designed by policy makers are required to aim at restructuring the final emissions. In this paper an effort is made to assess a new structure for the final demand which would be able to achieve a composite task: the economic sustainability and the environmental improvement. In this respect, the regional Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), referred to a typical region of the Mediterranean area, the Sardinia, will be integrated with the environmental accounting scheme in order to develop the regional multisectoral extended model. The resulting inverse matrix will be used to identify which composition of the final demand (policy control variable) is consistent with the complex emissions together with a positive variation of the aggregate total output (policy target variable). For this purpose the Macro Multipliers approach, through the use of a bidimensional decision-making index, will allow us to identify the convenient structures for both economic and environmental target and assessing the expected negative trade-off.

The increasing attention to climate changes have led national Governments to design environmental tax policies able to face environmental problems and their associated economic consequences like as a negative change of GDP. The environmental taxation in particular is considered a powerful instrument of pollution control. More important, it provides public revenue that can be recycled at local level in order to attain the regional double dividend in a fiscal federalism framework. In this respect, we use a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model with imperfect labour market, to assess the regional effects of an environmental fiscal reform designed with the aim of reducing the CO2 emissions in a fiscal federalism setting. In particular, we introduce a local green tax on commodities output with a progressive structure. The tax burden depends on the commodity polluting power. According to fiscal federalism principles the tax revenue is collected by the local Government and it is entirely recycled to finance the local consumption expenditure. The application is done on a bi-regional Social Accounting Matrix for Italy and the results highlights the distributional effects of the reform on macroeconomic variables into the bi-regional income circular flow.

The analysis of the ire reform cannot be simply limited to describe the fiscal saving for the different categories of income collectors. The main implication of such reform it would be the impulse for the whole economy through the support to the final demand of consumption. The attention should be moved to the possible economic effects, that can be considered in disaggregated terms, both for productive attivities and institutional sectors. Such fiscal politic should produce effects on the industrial production through the enhanced disposable income, which produces new final demand. In the following analysis we will use a multisectorial extensive model, useful to describe the whole income circular flow; in this way we can estimate the impact on the industrial production of the ire reform and we will analyze potential alternative scenarios, describing various politic’s options that can be realized with same amount of fiscal resources.

It is well known that the water cycle is going to assume a central role in the economic system because of its increasing relative shortage. This means that even though the water available to planet Earth is the same water that has always been available and the only water that ever will be available, in reality however, we have a limited amount of usable drinking water. Since the drinking water conservation and its production depends on the economic activity, in this paper we analyse the link between water cycle and the economic system constructing a new type or framework that combines standard material of account (MFA) techniques with make and use (M&U) accounting matrices in order to coordinate the physical issues of accounting to the value issues. The impact of economic policies on the water cycles as well as consistency of policies with sustainability is then evaluated showing the importance of the natural resourceseconomic system feedback in this kind of analysis. In other terms, this new framework allows the analyst to consider both the effect of given policies on the water cycle and the constraint produced by the sustainability problem on the economic system. Finally, we studied the dynamical system resulting from the MFA and M&U integration and show how to investigate the estimation problem of the framework extrapolating the use by use matrices from the system.